Saturday pub

Christmas Day in the pub

In the pub on Christmas Day, the people come and go. Locals and visitors, men and women, dogs but no cats, the harassed staff pulling pints and offering mulled wine, while those who ignore each other throughout the year shake hands and proffer cheers and the best wishes of the season. Though some, jaded in their views, have another vision: ‘At Christmas and especially the day itself all of a sudden it is full of people whom I would call amateurs, in Xmas jumpers,’ once said to me in a pub when I was talking with a regular about the idea behind A Pub For All Seasons.

But back to my romantic view, to which I have subscribed with solemn loyalty for many years, especially when I recall visits to my local pub on Exmoor, family in tow, for an hour while the turkey went to its inexorable fate in the oven back at home. There did seem to be a different mood, an undercurrent of relaxation, a sense of excitement, an escape even, as we all crammed into the tiny bar and shivered with anticipation at the first pint of the day (or G&T or rum and coke or whatever rocked your boat).

I recall thinking about the cliche that the pub was a democracy and how it actually seemed in existence that day. The itinerant labourer and occasional picker-up at the local shoot, who lived in a caravan in the middle of a sodden field, chatted intently with the London-based architect, whose house in the centre of town was perhaps one of the most expensive around. The ancient titled lady — once asked by a slightly intoxicated bar manager (that predilection for drinking on shift was sadly his downfall) how she came to be a lady, an occasion in which I nearly butted in by saying, ‘my father was one’ (he was a lord apparently) — sat down at a wooden table with one of the volunteer firemen, a builder by trade. In conversation they engaged, two worlds apart, but for once brought into the same sphere by Christmas Day in the pub.

There is certainly, from my experience, something special about a pint in the pub on Christmas Day, though it’s not something I do anymore, as the nearest pub open is a Wetherspoons. I occasionally visit it and I am sure that Christmas Day within its confines is just as genial as I felt it to be in my old local on Exmoor, but I stay at home and plan and cook lunch.

A pub I regularly visit, The Bridge Inn at Topsham, five miles from where I live, opens for a couple of hours and the landlady Caroline recently told me that hundreds of people turn up and that there was a separate bar to dispense Branoc, which is the pub’s popular session ale. Other beers poured from the wood are of a stronger cast, the kind of strength that would make a cat speak. I am sure that the mood is joyous and celebratory, a cacophony of voices and laughter, inside and outside the pub. The parlour to the left of the pub corridor I guess to be warmed by the well-lit fire and full of eager drinkers, as would I suspect to be the back bar, again with a well-warming fire and conversation ebbing and flowing like the tidal river just below the pub. One day I shall get there on Christmas Day.

Let me finish with these words from A Pub For All Seasons, coming from someone I know who was living in Norwich when we spoke, someone for whom Christmas Day in the pub was extra special.

‘Christmas is one of the best times of the year at the pub as it’s the one time of year nobody is ever alone,’ he told me. ‘This is a time when it is easier to have conversations with strangers as people are often tightly packed in, sitting on a table right next to you or opposite on the sofa next to the open fire. My two locals in Norwich, The Artichoke and The Leopard, I go to at any time of year but there’s something special about an open fire, a Christmas tree and people just generally being happy.

‘Last Christmas Day was one of my favourite days of drinking. I went to The Artichoke when it opened as my girlfriend was working and just hung out with people, drank pints of Rothaus Lager and shots of Mozart with my good friends who work there as well as their friends, some of whom I’d never met, and felt a proper sense of community, of belonging. It was simply incredible.’

Will you be in the pub on Christmas Day?

Shameless plug: my latest book A Pub For All Seasons is now available (Headline).